The Glory
by nimmieamee
Summary: The tale of the luckiest young pureblood in the world, some time after our Lord defeated the blood traitors. Sequel to the Eleventh Birthdays, but can stand on its own.


The house on Helvede Hill was slate-grey. It had two tall, tall windows on either side of a tall, narrow door. There was a wraparound gallery added some time after the initial stone structure had been built; this was incongruous, and gave passersby the impression that the house was hiding something. An assortment of windows were tacked onto the place: oval ones with black and green panes, and small circular ones, and square ones with heavy shutters, and high, high up on top of the house there was a lone dormer, and if someone squinted they might have seen, made insubstantial by the ever-present rain, a lone white figure with pale hair staring glassily down the drive.

This figure was the cherished crowning glory of Helvede Hill. All other inhabitants of the house were soggy with their regard for this person. They would come in, dripping from the rain and damp that blanketed the drive, obediently spell this all away in the mudroom, and then completely forget to remove the enormous degree of concern they had for their own tow-headed boy; they would proceed into the house drenched with it, covered head to toe in worry for him and full of disquietude, fearing that he might go down the wrong path at any moment. Oh, surely not! Not the house's crowning glory!

The persons who stomped to and from the house were these: three (3) nearly-interchangeable tutors, constantly being dismissed and exchanged for new tutors, whose specialties were generally defense and dueling and Darkest Magic. For the glory-boy, of course. Then also four (4) house elves, whose jobs were to trim the muddy gardens and make them suitable places for quiet juvenile reflection, also to cook healthful pumpkin meals to aid in growth and childish digestion, also to keep the house as neat and free of filth as necessary to inculcate cleanliness in a young mind. Also to iron their ears when he told them to. Then there came on occasion one (1) Borgin's salesgirl, far too old to be termed a girl at all, who was contracted to keep the house properly outfitted with the latest accoutrements, the house on Helvede Hill being very charmingly modern and ambitious, a forward-looking house that believed in the latest modes, always at the cutting edge of taste.

Finally there often came three to four (3.5 or so) official visitors each week, always for his parents, stopping by to beg the glory-child's pardon and to deliver official missives. These missives sat on the narrow black hall table until the elves could tackle them. They were heavy with official seals and secrets. To the crowning glory they appeared for all the world like countdown hexes ready to go off at any minute. He would squeeze past them anxiously, pale face pinching with fright, fearful even to look, let alone touch.

There were two people who did not inhabit the house. These were his parents. The Mr. and Mrs. of the glory family lived at present in Wiltshire, in a grandiose style befitting their positions and beauty and ability. They did not visit; when they needed him, the crowning glory of Helvede Hill came to them, always in the same expensive but uncomfortable pressed grey robes, present at the appointed time and not a minute earlier or later, or else a house elf would have to suffer for it.

And he would have to suffer for it, too.

The Mrs. was impossibly tall, of regal bearing, with a figure that was the envy of the countryside. She wore her magnificence grimly, like the wolf does, as though she might throw it away any minute to achieve her aims. She was regarded one of the great intellectual minds of the century and might have been a Ravenclaw, save that she was worth too much for such a lesser house. Her skin was impossibly white and perfect. Spotless. As was her blood: she could never have lived happily in a slate grey house instead of a white Wiltshire manor, so she did not, but then she was rarely at the manor, either. She was often in London, at the Ministry. She was one of those creatures always on hand to wind up society to ensure it ran just so: a woman of paramount importance.

But she had a streak in her that only the glory boy could detect. Something rotten and enticing, a kind of spoiled childishness that appeared only in the small crook of her elegant eyebrow, or under the shadow of a long thick lash. No one else could ever seem to see it; to every other person she was only the most beautiful woman in the world, society's watchwoman, an adult in every sense. But the boy could see something else in her, some high-voiced selfishness that ran deep, the last vestiges of a cruel and babyish girl.

The Mr. was a pompous bore. He enjoyed crup coursing and various kinds of fantastical falconry. He was properly obsessed with snakes: almost a small child with a fixation. Everywhere about his person were various emblems of snakes: snakes to tie his hair and to serve as laces, snakes' heads to affix to his wand cane, snakes tattooed on his forearm, snakes on his belt and on his buttons, snakes on his lapels and at his cuffs, snakes in ominous decorative patterns on his handkerchiefs and snuff box and embroidered into his bed linens. He believed the world was a damnable, terrible place and always getting worse. He would say this to anyone who cared to listen, anyone dropping by his manor, anyone he encountered on the way to his many Gringotts vaults, anyone who he stumbled upon during his languid travels – he traveled a great deal, to Denmark and Norway and other such enlightened places where the people were civilized and good. He was, like his wife, a person of some importance.

But neither came to the house much, if ever. The boy was not sure they had ever set foot in it. The house on Helvede Hill was his (in fact, the Mr. often made a great show of having ceded it to him entirely, lucky little devil), and he appeared punctually in it at every holiday break, as instructed by his parents, which fairly drove him mad, as he would have preferred to stay at Hogwarts. He hated the house. It was only ever him and the elves and occasionally a new tutor. And the Borgin salesgirl come to update the Vanishing Cabinet, if he was lucky. Hogwarts was no great place, not for him, but he would have liked to stay there over holidays, curled up before the common room fire, reading while tucked into one of the deep recesses of the high tower windows, or else trading careful conversation with the Fat Lady. But it could never be so. Appeals to his Head of House made no difference. The man only looked, with kindly pity, down at him, and declared, "You remind me so much of myself at your age, my boy. No backbone. No backbone until life forces you to find it for yourself."

The Head of House was a hero of great renown, a champion of the War, who had struck down traitors in his day. But then of course the traitors hadn't meant anything to him. Whereas the chief boggart of the boy's life was the Mrs., the one parent he truly loved and feared in equal measure, with her fall of shining hair, her high white brow, her costly Twilfit cloaks, her star-flower perfumes, and her disappointment.

The Mrs. might have permitted him to live in Wiltshire with the rest of the family. Might have. If only he weren't such a disappointment.

Instead of growing tall and broad, the shape most befitting a crowning glory, the boy grew up in stunted and fearful starts, sure to come out mostly tall, in the end, but also far too skinny in places. A throwback to some weaker cousins, long dead now, no doubt due to their defective formation. The Mrs., who believed in the evolutionary model of progress, in all the world marching forward to ever-new heights of greatness and power, found this regression very bothersome. To the house on Helvede hill she would dispatch mediwizards and nutritionists, Ministry measure-takers and foreign specialists. To ascertain the rate and value of the boy's physical and magical development. And all the results came back terribly disappointing. Weak wrists, as though the ancient Bulstrode blood were showing. A thoroughly unpleasant chin, no doubt attributable to the patrilineal side of things. Slight bones, a slight to generations determinedly intermarrying with Flints and Crabbes and other such luminaries.

Instead of being the perfect result of a grand evolutionary ladder, instead of promising her all the future, the boy seemed a curious offshoot on the family tree, one piece growing twisted and gnarled, sure to die out in the future. She might have culled him if she could have replaced him with something better. Alas, she could not. The mediwizards had informed her there was no hope for it; no other children would be born to take the position of crowning glory.

Still, the Mrs. might have borne this with good grace, if only his mind had been sharp and quick and clever. Her own mind was. She was the chief organizer of the social order, she could stack and manage and classify and arrange as perfectly as a Gringotts money-counter, only of course she was far greater than those horrible little pests, for they were goblins who stacked money, and she was a witch who stacked people. A nobler occupation for a nobler being, a higher step on the mago-evolutionary ladder.

But the boy, though passably magical and a decent one for studying, was in many ways a complete little fool. He had no sense. Many people are born without sense; we believe that sense, as a trait, is distinct from things like brow shape and magical ability and hair color. We assume it might be learned over time, acquired through outside means, donned the way one dons a cloak. But it is not so. Some people are simply born senseless, unthinking, impulsive, and only environmental extremes threatening extinction will force them to change. The Mrs. had attempted to create such extremes for the boy. She was not sparing with the jinxes and hexes as a means of punishment (you will recall that some time before the war certain blood traitors attempted to ban these methods of child-rearing; but never fear, the Mrs. and her people had put a stop to that). She had showed him, at the age of four, how one dismembers a disobedient house elf – one step below a disobedient child, a half-step above a Squib. She even contrived to control every aspect of his social behavior, shoving at him children who had been thoroughly cowed by their parents, browbeaten into learning sense.

But nothing changed. Sense eluded the boy. Legilimentic specialists and Imperio experts of every stripe had decreed it so, demonstrating how susceptible he was to outside influence, how weak and sniveling, how fearful he could be. And of course his Sorting confirmed it. The only remedy would be to strengthen the blood somehow. Find the boy a mate, control the breeding, and see how the offspring resulted. Thankfully, he was currently thirteen; in a few months' time fourteen. Well past due. Time to make a match. She required that he open the house on Helvede Hill. She'd required him to do this on every holiday since his thirteenth birthday. He was to receive young witches of her choosing: those with the most faultless blood. So over spring holidays, when the blush of the fairest season had descended over every part of the countryside save, of course, Helvede Hill, which was still gray and soggy, the boy offered a dour welcome to a young witch of good society.

She trooped in unhappily. Her shoes were ruined by all the mud on the drive, and it had not occurred to her to spell the filth away in the mudroom. This in turn made the boy unhappy. He resolved to keep her from the rest of the house. It was a dull house, but it was his house, and he did not want her dragging her feet through it, ruining the grey carpets, caking it all over the ugly black wood tables. This was all he could imagine her doing if she were to enter his life on a more permanent basis. Mucking it up with a sour face and muddy feet.

He did not have much imagination.

His guest was forced to put her cloak back on. They went back into the rain. She had brought a black lace umbrella, which made him glare at her with no small amount of judgment. The Mrs. did not like umbrellas, raincoats, or other such accoutrements. She believed them to be remnants of that dark period of Muggle-loving that had descended over the world not too long ago. The boy was always instructed to spell the rain away, like a proper wizard should. This he did now. But he did not do it for the girl. He allowed her to keep her black, frilly umbrella. A chivalrous approach, he felt, not to point out her faux pas.

She was soon soaked through and shivering.

They trooped along the paths, grey gravel and brown mud flaring up all around them. The girl's purple silk shoes were now beyond salvation, and perhaps this accounted for her mournful face. The crowning glory of Helvede Hill really could not be sure, and in any case he did not have time to wonder. It was his duty to show her all the many garden sights: the black metal fountain with its quiet rush of water always drowned out by the rain, the black stone carvings of beheaded men and sad women with dead infants, the great gate with its pattern of iron spiders (the Mr.'s actual totem animal; his family heraldry featured no snakes whatsoever), the hedges that were supposed to be shaped like fauna but that the rain had obscured into grey and formless lumps, the greenhouse with its poisonous vines and that strange black bathtub from which sprouted a sad grey palm, transposed from foreign shores some time ago. All this! The grey glories of Helvede Hill.

The girl gave a sob.

"What is it?" said the boy, annoyed. Chivalry demanded that he ask.

Her mouth turned down piteously. She dug around in her pink silk pockets, producing, at last, some strips of white. The boy imagined this might be a handkerchief, to wipe at her tear-and-rain-streaked face. It was not. It was only some parchment, crisp and perfect, bespelled to keep off rain entirely. Through this he deduced that the parchment did not belong to her.

"Look!" she said, still sobbing. "Look what I found in Parvati's satchel."

"I don't know why you think that will interest me," he said scornfully.

"It's Blaise's," she forced out, ignoring this interruption. "It's Blaise's, and look what he's written!"

Blaise was a tall, broad-shouldered, good-looking young man of already-fourteen. He was considered the luckiest boy at Hogwarts. Through some combination of fortunate stars, his mother had murdered his father, and then a subsequent father had murdered his mother. Blaise was now unattached, free. No parents whatsoever. He held the reins to a sizeable Gringotts fortune, some legal quirk forcing the cruel stepparent (whom he claimed to get along with perfectly well, murder notwithstanding) to contend himself with only a small salary out of it. The laws of the land made Blaise a ward of the Ministry; in truth, he would be a free man at the age of seventeen, and while the Ministry would claim his British assets, he would have, he was quick to point out to anyone who would listen, a palazzo in Venice, and a small castle in Spain, and a townhouse in Vienna, and a villa with a great palm-lined drive out in the West Indies somewhere. Whole chunks of the world were carved out for him, just beyond the bounds of British wizardry. They would be his for the taking. Blaise would someday leap from these grey shores, escape, unencumbered, owing nothing to anyone, not held back by any love or fear for any Mrs. of a mother.

The crowning glory of Helvede Hill was bitterly, bitterly jealous of Blaise.

"Blaise!" he said now, glumly.

"He's in love with Parvati! I know he is," sobbed the girl.

Parvati was one of the prettiest girls at Hogwarts, so this did not seem unlikely. The crowning glory of Helvede Hill had hosted her over Christmas holidays. She had regarded him with thinly-veiled distaste. He'd found he did not like her quick way of glancing sideways at things, measuringly; it reminded him of the Mrs. It was a talent cultivated in Slytherin house, they said, to quantify and assess everything, from the elves to the carpets to the people around one, and always in such a rapid, accurate fashion. Parvati had assessed him. She'd said, "You're not terribly brave, are you? You'll be good and quiet and you'll tell her I'm not the One. Or else." And he'd nodded, agreed. And then they'd sat silently in the parlor until it was time for Parvati to go.

Now this girl wiped her nose with the back of a ruined silk glove. "Read it! Read it! This one's Parvati. And the other I took from Blaise's potions book. Oh, they're horrible! They're horrible!"

The crowning glory did not want to take the parchment, as it was offered with the same hand she'd wiped her nose with. But she kept thrusting both scrolls into his face and the whole business became inconvenient. He told himself that probably Blaise and Parvati, who had bespelled the rain off, would have bespelled muck and snot off as well. Then he took the scrolls of parchment.

He unfurled them. They were all covered in words. Notes. A thing very much forbidden at Hogwarts, and now two golden students – Blaise and Parvati, of all people! – had been caught out. Revealed. The punishment that might befall them! The very thought of it made the boy queasy. He strode to an arbor hung with knotted brown vines, with two cunning wooden seats carved into each side of the interior. He sat on one, not much caring if the girl followed. Then he read.

It was nonsense.

Parvati and Blaise were in love, he supposed. The proof of this was that for stretches they seemed to have talked of nothing and been perfectly happy with that; only people in love did things like this. And it was talking, of a sort. He had a refilling quill in his pocket. He took it out and scrawled a great bunch of flowing claptrap – pictures of birds, a sketch of a spider, the letter 'M' in increasingly ornate ways – onto Parvati's scroll. And saw that, after a half-second, it all appeared on Blaise's. So too from Blaise's to Parvati's. Very clever, this parchment. Much better than passing notes, to simply teleport them in this way. Still, of course, against the rules.

Parvati had wanted a little message, that's all. A little reminder from you to me.

And Blaise had provided, Ah Sunflower, weary of time, who countest the steps of the sun; seeking after that sweet golden clime where the traveller's journey is done; where the youth pined away with desire, and the pale virgin shrouded in snow, arise from their graves and aspire where my Sunflower wishes to go!

Nonsense. Of the frilliest, simplest variety. Young love. But why keep it a secret, resort to criminality?

The wet silk girl answered. "Blaise isn't even supposed to go with a girl like her, a girl who has the unmarked in her family!" said she, now tucked into the opposite side of the arbor, her umbrella lolling carelessly on the ground. "She wasn't even supposed to be an option for him!"

Ah.

It did not seem to the crowning glory that this affair was any of his business, not at all. True, certain aspects of it were upsetting. Namely, what might happen to Blaise and Parvati if their clandestine union were discovered. Parvati, if the sodding wet sob girl were to be believed, had at least one dreadful blight on her bloodline. And Blaise, naturally, was a ward of the Ministry, and did not have to rush into marriage the way normal people did, but he did have to make sure not to court the wrong sort. The folks down at Ministry wouldn't like that at all. Why on earth couldn't the stupid fool just wait until he were free?

Because of course Blaise was going to be free, the boy thought glumly. Unlike some people.

"Why are you even talking about Blaise?" said the boy, after several minutes of silence punctuated by sobbing. "You're supposed to be talking about me." Then he reflected on this, and considered the principles of chivalry, and amended. "Well. To me, anyway."

The wet silk girl stopped crying into her gloves and looked at him fully, for the first time in the entire hour since her arrival. She had very flat, unhappy, large pale blue eyes; red-rimmed now, they looked particularly ghastly to the boy, like the bulbous eyes of house elves. She said, snappishly, "I don't even want to be here! She's made me come!" Then she burst into tears again.

"If—if I don't put up a good impression, my uncle says," sobbed the girl. "Then—then daddy, who was dying for the position reporting back on the French, won't ever—ever get it! And maybe She'll find a way to punish him! And She'll certainly punish me; She'll tell Carrow, and Carrow will do it! You don't know how lucky you are that your head of house is—"

"Alright," said the boy, uneasily, something occurring to him. "That's enough. I'll tell her you made a good impression, but that you're not for me. She won't much like it, but she won't take it out on you, I hope. Just the elves."

He was speaking of the Mrs. But he was not thinking of her. For once.

Parvati and Blaise's Head of House was not going to be merciful. His might be, in a similar situation. That was one of the perks of being in his house. One of the few perks. But Carrow, now Carrow was not the merciful sort. And the crowning glory had no love for Parvati or Blaise, but neither did he want to see them punished; the very thought made his weak wrists shake. His face went even paler, though of course he could not see it or tell. And in his mind he hit a wall, a blank deadness, a familiar and terrible swell of fear.

Parvati and Blaise punished! For something as silly and small as love.

"Oh, will you?" the wet silk girl was saying, "Will you tell Her—"

"Yes," he said irritably. "On one condition. What are you going to do?"

"Do?" said the wet silk girl. She blinked prettily. Underneath all that wet, she really was nice-looking in the ancient, pale, near-animal fashion of witches of yore – eyes widespread, nose upturned, a pleasant drooping mouth; all her features seemed to be trying to escape in different directions, her magic forcing them away in a mad dash to burst out of her. The boy did not much care for this style of beauty, he discovered; in the eyes of the Mrs., however, such very witchy looks were sure to be commendable. The Mrs. would not be pleased that he had rejected this one. She was sure to call him pathetic, fastidious, a weak and pampered boy, a boy who did not deserve his own bloodline. There would be, if not outright curses, then hexes at the very least.

His weak wrists were now trembling very much, so much that he noticed. He put the parchment down on his lap. He collected his thoughts.

"About Parvati and Blaise. What are you going to do?" the boy said.

The girl gathered herself up. She said, self-righteously, "Well, I'm required to report it, of course. Fancy you asking me that!" She tapped her inner left forearm, covered by all that drenched pink and purple silk. She said, "You know, the only reason I haven't already is because Parvati and I are so close. And it hurts me to do it. You don't believe me, but it does. What have I got, if not my friends? But she's a terrible liar. She said there was nothing between them, and she knows perfectly well how I feel about Blaise! Anyway, she knew it would be better to leave him alone. All it would take would be one tap with my wand, and—"

The boy winced. He knew perfectly well what it would take. He clutched his own forearm anxiously and said, "Don't."

"What?" said the girl, irritably.

"Pansy, don't," he said. "That's my condition: don't report them."

Pansy's delicate, sparse brows shot upwards.

"You're very close to Parvati—" he tried.

"I could get in trouble if I don't!" Pansy said. "For concealing it! It hardly matters to you. You don't know! You're shielded from everything, daddy says! You don't have to suffer the way everyone else does; everyone knows that ever since your parents—"

He took the scrolls, crumpled them each into a ball, and shoved them into his robes.

"And what evidence are you going to present, when the Undersecretary asks?" he said, a little bit surprised at his temerity. "These are staying with me, you know."

"Give them back!" Pansy cried, standing up and lunging at him. "They're mine!"

He reached for his wand. She reached for hers. They disarmed each other at the same time; a rare occurrence in the annals of dueling, but not impossible, and growing ever more common in youthful scraps since parents across magical Britain had begun to see the usefulness of tutoring their tots in offensive magic. The crowning glory believed this would be the end of it. They could both recover their wands, now rolling about in the muck under a nearby thorny bush. They would both be a little sheepish about it. And that would be that. Civilized discussion would ensue.

Unfortunately, Pansy did not agree.

He had not anticipated that she would be so strong, but she was, even swathed all in wet pastel silk. They rolled around in the mud and gravel beneath the arbor, centuries of perfect breeding giving way to common Muggle tussling. In the struggle, Pansy scratched the glory boy on his cheek and bit his hand; she was pale and pretty, but also blithely unconcerned with the rules of fighting fair. He won, but just barely. He had recently had a sharp burst of growth that put him three inches above her and gave him better reach. Had she been a stout and large-boned girl, she might still have bested him. Alas for Pansy, she was slim as a gazelle, a parlor pureblood from a line cultivated to decorate arms and light up at dinner parties, not to win wrestling matches in the mud.

"You took those notes from Parvati and Blaise," he said stiffly, sitting awkwardly on her chest and feeling both foolish and ungentlemanly. "They aren't yours. Anyway, you'll be questioned and cross-examined and it won't be worth it. Let them be found out in their own time. You stay out of it, and I'll tell Her you were perfect the whole time. But—"

Here he leaned forward, to get his point across.

"—breathe a word to anyone, and I'll tell Her you were awful, just awful, but that I want to see you again anyway! And then She'll make you come back!"

Pansy bared her teeth, un-cowed. She said, "I want to go home! I hate you!"

"Alright," he said easily, and got up, and retrieved their wands. He was supposed to escort Pansy home; he found that this would have been impossibly awkward, so he assigned two elves to the task, and thought he could detect some gratitude from Pansy on that score. Then again, maybe not.

"No one in the world will ever want to marry you," Pansy spat at him, as she left.

This seemed depressingly likely.

The rain and gloom around the house deepened after she was gone. He hadn't liked her company, not really. But it was better than being alone. One of the living statues in the garden had been awakened by the tussle. It was now screaming curses in French, and he had to dispatch another elf to quiet it down, which would take some time, as Helvede Hill's statues were the purest and fiercest sorts, ancient ancestors who would not bow to a mere elf even if the elf was living flesh, and they only cold dead stone. This left him with one elf, not terribly useful in terms of conversation because no elves were. He had read all the books in the house forty times over, even the very Dark ones. He had completed all his schoolwork on the train home. He took it out, looked it over. Nothing to add. He went down the narrow grey back stairs to the glass-walled Dueling room. He could practice hexes and positions; he should, if Pansy had almost bested him. But there was no one to practice on. Possibly the one remaining elf, but then the elves lived in a sort of blank terror of him, which the Mrs. always said was good and natural. If he had not lived his whole life with a similar sort of blank terror of her, he might have believed her.

So he did not want to duel an elf. It would only let him win, anyway, which wasn't much useful practice. It might even lay down and let him kill it. He sometimes liked to fantasize that he might do the same, if the Mrs. ever decided to simply snuff him out.

There was really one thing he wanted to do. But it was painful. He was afraid to do it. This was more than the constant, low-level fear he always felt. This was the rushing, roaring thing he'd experienced when thinking of Parvati and Blaise punished. A devouring fear, making the great grey room too big and too small at the same time, like nothing could make it alright, like he would live out all his days, terrified and disappointing, in the grey house on Helvede Hill, staring down the drive.

He would. That was just what would happen to him. He would live and die here. Shielded from everything. Choking on his own fear.

He found he couldn't breathe. He was forced against the grey wallpapered wall, slid down to his knees, and put his head between his legs. There were potions and things to help with this (though it was a mark of weakness; the Mrs. always said so), but he did not feel like looking for them. He only kept his head down and tried to think of nothing, just breathing in and out, and after a while this common Muggle remedy did the trick.

He kept his mind carefully blank, stood unsteadily, and turned on the Wizarding Wireless. Slumped into a straight-backed grey chair that was not made for slumping.

Rita Skeeter – magical media queen – was discussing the French problem. The French problem was something he knew much about. The Muggle infestation began at Calais, the Mrs. always said. It weighed heavily on the Mrs.'s mind. She did not mention it to him in any detail, of course, not anymore than she discussed the inherently unruly nature of the werewolves, or her struggles with certain rivals in the Department of Mysteries. She would send the crowning glory only bits of post discussing his duties to his blood and name, when she had to communicate with him at all. But the Mr. often intimated that she did not write more because, of course, she had so much to deal with when it came to the French problem.

The crowning glory settled in to ignore Skeeter's chatter. He let the cadence of her words wash over him. Hoped this would chase away any urge to finger the notes in the pocket of his robes, to compare them with what was in the trunk upstairs. The trunk. Oh, the trunk. Just relics from the house in Wiltshire. Doused in perfume, tied with faded and colorful ribbons, a whole trunk of rotting sketches and nonsense verse, a story slowly withering away over time, quite curious and absorbing for all that. The only bit of non-grey in all of Helvede Hill.

"Quite worthless, my boy! Of course you can have them," the Mr. had said, when the boy had first discovered the trunk in a room off of the grand Wiltshire library.

And they were worthless. Scrolls and scrolls of love-notes, that was all. Scrolls and scrolls and small baubles, little charms, and two wands in a false bottom of the trunk (which the Mr. must not have known about), and a smattering of photographs, only one of which was at all valuable to the crowning glory, and heaps of colorful feathers and preserved flowers. The sort of rot people threw away after you were dead; things that had no meaning unless someone living was there to imbue them with it. This must have been why the Mr. had tossed it on him, instead of taking it to Gringotts with the valuables. The Mr. handled the care of all the Gringotts vaults, and the apportioning of the houses besides, and around his neck he had all the great keys which corresponded to the names in the trunk. There was only one key he did not care much about, and this was the one that corresponded to the vault for Helvede Hill. This one was not a shabby vault, he explained to the boy. Full enough. The kind of family fortune that would leave the child very comfortable all his days.

Not, of course, much of a fortune compared to the Wiltshire money. But something. Something he was willing to give the boy.

A new feeling was taking over the boy, who was often commanded by his feelings, who could be felled by despair or choked up by fear in an instant. But this was not fear or despair. It was bitterness, plain and simple. It was anger. He stood. He completely forgot the Wireless was on; he did not even bother to turn it off before crossing out of the room and taking the stairs two at a time. On the landing, the last elf popped into view and accosted him, something about another message for his mother, which would have to be taken to Wiltshire immediately; it was an issue of a certain werewolf that had once terrorized the countryside, and therefore very important. The boy smacked him out of the way carelessly. It wasn't like the elf answered to him anyway. Then he proceeded up the narrow passage to the highest reaches of the house, the stairs all carpeted with grey and green and lit by globular green glass lamps, like drops of galvanic poison smeared at intervals on the eerie grey flesh of the house.

At the top was a room the Mr. and Mrs. did not know he used. It was only a sliver of a room, thin and whitewashed and plain, a kind of storage space. He was always very careful to let the elves think he went up there to think, nothing more. But he did not do much thinking there. Whenever he opened the trunk, the fear in him would climb. A crescendo. This was why he hadn't wanted to face the trunk, but there was nothing for it. He would have to, would have to face his fear. The Hat had told him as much, when it had Sorted him.

"Slytherin?" the Hat had said. "No, no. Maybe in another life, my boy. You don't value ambition nearly enough, I'm afraid."

"I do!" he had insisted. "I want to be more. I want to—"

"Slytherin will help you to be more," the Hat had agreed, temporarily quelling his fear. "Will put you on the path to big things. It always does, for nearly everyone. But you don't want big things."

As he had spent all his life wanting to escape Helvede Hill, that had seemed preposterous at the time. What did he want, if not greatness?

"You already have the luckiest position in all the world, though, don't you?" the Hat had said.

This had hit him like an electric charge. The Hat was of course right. He was lucky. He was shielded from everything. Others, they lived interconnected with their fellow witches and wizards. A failure here could mean a demotion for a father. A single spot of bad blood, one wicked relation, could mean the end of certain romantic prospects. But he? He was in the care of two of the most important people in all the world. And any evils, any wickedness in his past, any rotting secrets in the trunk – these had never signified, for him. He was the only child the Mrs. would ever have, and therefore accorded great deference. Even if he was terrified of her.

"You do not want to be great," the Hat had told him. "You want to be free, free of your fear. You value courage, not ambition. Even if you have precious little courage right now. But Slytherin will not help give you more. No. So it had better be—"

"No! No!" he had cried.

But of course it had been too late. Another awful disappointment for the Mrs. The curses had come liberally, that first holiday break. But, curiously, thinking of those curses was better than thinking of what was in the trunk.

The trunk held the source of all his problems. Most of them laid out on crumpled balls of parchment, just like the ones in his pockets. Only the ones in the trunk had been in his possession for some years now, and had suffered far more abuse from him. Crumpling, smoothing, re-crumpling, ripping, throwing, stomping, even wholesale destruction by spell-fire. These love notes, or what remained of them, were the most valuable things in all the world to him. But he also hated them very much.

He found the photograph first. He had never been able to bring himself to destroy it. The man in the photograph was very familiar. The slimness of him, in spite of his height. The weak wrists, the damnable chin, the oddly dark slashes for eyebrows, the glassy and pale eyes with their near-white lashes. The crowning glory saw these things in the mirror each day. Only this man had never slunk around in a sad grey house. He was sitting, rather bored, in a room with gleaming floors and gleaming ceilings, and portraits in shining gilt frames and statuettes with each angle scrubbed until they glowed. There was also a great mirror that somehow made everything in the room appear even more lustrous than it already was, especially the woman in the center of the room, who was so polished and glossy and radiant that she appeared to be just another statuette on display.

There was also a cradle. It was also faultless and immaculate, with a great many unsullied white blankets and a baby and a multitude of starched, spotless white pillows. In the photograph, the woman was always bent over the cradle. The man would move. Stand. Gesticulate. Scowl. The woman, so beautiful, her figure very stunning, her skin so glossy, would only admire the baby. Or perhaps the pillows. The crowning glory really could not tell. Either way, her face, with its luminous blue eyes and its brilliantly formed mouth and its fair, delicately arched brows, would take obvious pleasure in the cradle. The marble skin would flush slightly, and the elegant lower lip dip down in a sigh, and she would not bother to adjust the lock of fair hair that would fall over her shoulder. This was not attractive in a statuette, and so she must have been a living woman. Once. A woman whose chief talent was her ability to appear crafted from porcelain, with a tendency to inhabit gleaming rooms.

The crowning glory could not connect to either person. For all that he saw the man in the mirror, for all that certain perfect quirks of the woman seemed to recall the Mrs., that most perfect creature of all…

He simply did not know them. Still. He had never been able to destroy their photograph. Certain others – a sullen pair of boys, distant cousins, arranged in the center of a pile of barking dogs; a slim girl who was so very like the Mrs. that it had made him uneasy – had fallen victim to fits of formless, insensible rage. But this photograph, he felt, was special. He had a whole history for these two people, after all. Years and years of Owl Post, that method of communication available to all before the war, all carefully preserved and stored in the trunk.

An early edition, from the woman to the man: Do say you don't love that horrible Alectotype. I saw her sitting with you across the Great Hall as I came in, both of you all glinty with your new prefects' badges, and I nearly fainted. She is so ordinary and typical and you so wonderful. You must know I'm by far the better match. Don't let the naysayers remind you of my age.

A rebuttal, from the man to the woman, But you are still not yet thirteen. The dogs, no friend to me, and Black to the core, will have my head if I try anything!

And more in this vein. The man and woman had talked of nothing for years. Though their clothing dated them to the war, to the terrible era of bullies and werewolves and savage infestations that threatened to roll back magical progress, for much of their lives they seemed not to have been touched by those events at all. They were like him. Shielded. Only he was safe in an ugly grey house, and they in a gleaming white one. That was the only difference. That was all. He wondered if they, like him, had ever had reason to want to escape.

Aside from the obvious reason – that baby in the cradle, whom they had loved very much and who had doomed them – probably not.

This represented the very nadir of his thoughts, which had already been quite low since he'd been forced to retire to Helvede Hill. Here they were! The first two to have been punished for love. And he was so like them in some ways. And then in all the ways that mattered, as the entwined Slytherin ties in the bottom of the trunk seemed to say, he was not like them at all. He was simply a disappointment. Perhaps this was not the nadir. Perhaps he could go lower still. For hadn't the Mrs. once said that the man had had a forceful presence? A powerful stride? Grown into broad shoulders and all the nascent blood of the Goyles? And the woman, hadn't she been bred for excellence, like a silken gazehound, and hadn't she lived like the greatest of a long evolutionary line, a step forward, a strike for progress, more perfect and polished and glossy than any of her forbears? While he, the supposed crowning glory, he was—

Mercifully, for his psyche, something startled him from these thoughts. A noise. An uncommon kind of bumping noise, very loud, for it drowned out the ever-present heavy patter of the rain. It could not have been the house elves; two were with Pansy, a third still fighting the statute in the garden (a glance outside the window confirmed this; the elf was losing, and badly), and the fourth would have told him if it had returned from Wiltshire already. Could it be a tutor? But no. They only came later in the week. The Borgin's salesgirl, perhaps? Or Pansy, come to take revenge on him for the garden tussle.

He rushed to the landing and bolted the door to the attic room behind him, spelling it to open only at his touch. Then he carefully made his way downstairs to investigate. Surely it…it couldn't be the Mrs.? She never darkened Helvede Hill. She had Wiltshire, after all, and a spacious office at the Ministry, and a country house near Ottery St. Catchpole, and one or two townhouses in London, besides. But when the thought occurred to him, he realized he was still holding the photograph, and he stuffed it into his pocket in fright, next to Parvati and Blaise's crumpled parchment. If she should discover that he had it, who knew what might ensue? Everyone thought she was so controlled, so perfectly commanding. He knew better. He had seen her descend into indistinct, powerful rage over nothing, nothing at all, as though her powerful exterior was just a front to cover up that rotten, cruel little girl lurking in her eyes. That was simply who she was, who she really was. Nothing was needed to push her there.

And the man and woman in the picture were not nothing.

He was now on the second-lowest landing, the shadowiest part of the stairs, quite far from any of the poison-green lamps. He resolved to go quickly upstairs and return the photograph to its place, then to investigate. He could also hide Blaise and Parvati's parchment, in case it was Pansy come to retrieve it. How stupid of him to rush downstairs without setting everything carefully in the trunk first! This kind of impulsive, idiotic behavior was just what the Mrs. always complained of; it was the very worst and weakest of his character, something that ought to have been bred out of the line by now. Survival of the fittest, she often informed him, had operated beautifully, naturally, and quite killed off any cousins of theirs who behaved similarly. If he were not careful, it would probably do him in, as well. And no one could say it wouldn't be divine and proper.

He turned on his heel, seeing above the flicker of a distant lamp on the uppermost landing. And then, without warning, a shadow detached itself from the wall.

Now, the House on Helvede Hill had no ghosts or ghouls. Its walking statues were all kept out of doors. Its portraits were screaming, unhappy visions, and so the glory boy always kept their faces covered. But the house had many shadows. All houses which spread up, up, up towards high grey ceilings and have high grey windows to let in the wind and rain seem to collect shadows. But these shadows were dead things. They left him alone. They did not leap out at him, one from the left, one from the right. They were not supposed to be white and skinny, nor did they have devilish hollowed eyes, dark with mischief, nor did they laugh with almost no sound, just an exhalation of the breath, as they pounced.

The crowning glory gave a degrading animal shriek. He reached for his wand. He did not make it in time. It was a narrow landing, and the shadows were very close by. They made short work of him, one tackling him to the floor and binding his arms, the other sitting on his legs. Now he was fully repaid for the indignity he had served Pansy, and, twice in one day, he was reduced to common Muggle tussle and defeat.

The shadow sitting on his legs was in fact a shadow of the one sitting on his chest. They were identical. No. Only nearly so. One had a scar on the left side of his face. The other two, on the right. The one on the glory boy's chest had a livid purple bruise in the hollow of his throat; the other, pale and unblemished skin in just the same place. Both were shaggy-haired, wild, dirty in places, and skinnier than they ought to be for creatures with such very heavy weight to them. They were dressed in a manner familiar to the boy, in coarse brown, not nearly warm enough for Helvede Hill's chilly weather, with their robes barely coming past their skinny knees.

The unmarked.

But this made no sense! They should not have come here. They had no place in a proper magical home. They were wild, horrible, more animal than wizard, at this point. The world held many awful and stunted lesser races: hags, Veela, werewolves, vampires, goblins, centaurs, merpeople, centaurs, and manticores, to name a few. And a few useful ones like dementors and elves. The unmarked occupied an uneasy place in between. They had their uses – at Hogwarts they fulfilled important tasks: the caretakers of the Basilisk, the watchmen of the forest, or else there to be made an example of, to serve as test dummies in Dark magic class, to work at the behest of the professors – but they were in many ways more perverse and disgusting than even the foulest werewolf or hag.

The unmarked chose to be what they were.

They were the stuff of nightmares. Born magical and whole – sometimes even very pure! – with all the power of the average witch or wizard, or at least enough power for the Ministry to ascertain that they might have a place at Hogwarts, the unmarked then simply rejected all that. Rejected all of the grandeur of magical society. Rejected the compact between wizard and Ministry. Rejected the Minister, their Lord, himself.

Unthinkable.

Mr. Gibbon, the naturalist and great thinker who had spoken at Wiltshire at the behest of the Mrs., had performed a study of their brains. A masterpiece of dissection. And he had concluded that the unmarked existed to pervert the glorious forward march, the endless trudge towards progress that all magical evolution was supposed to undertake. In the past, Mr. Gibbon explained, these were just the sorts that went undetected, and populated society, and poisoned it. They opened the door to Muggle loving, to intermarriage with interlopers, and so held back the entire race. They were throwbacks. Of the most savage, traitorous sort.

Dread crept over the crowning glory. He began to feel light-headed. Where the unmarked touched his chest and legs, though layers of stiff and expensive grey robes separated them, he felt his skin grow tingly and unpleasant, as though it were soaking in their contagion. The one on his chest seemed to feel his discomfort. It – he, for it was male – bared its teeth.

"Not at your grand Manor?" he asked the crowning glory mockingly. "You hardly belong all the way out here."

"You're the one who doesn't belong!" the crowning glory retorted. His wand was very much out of reach. He didn't have the strength to force them off. And yet neither did he have the sense to stay quiet. It wasn't simply that he was afraid – he was always afraid, always, and so that was nothing new. It was that he was furious. Helvede Hill was an ugly house, and a gloomy one. But it was his. It was not supposed to be invaded. And why were they even here? He spat this question at them.

The one on his chest raised an eyebrow. Turned. Conferred with the one on his legs. The one on his legs said, almost peaceably, "Consider us a kind of accident, right?"

That went without saying. No unmarked could ever be anything more than the worst kind of accident. An accident played on the species.

"Accidents happen," said the one on his chest.

"You should have stayed in bed. That's the only way to avoid them," said the one on his legs.

"Though a stupid sod like you's probably falling out of bed at the slightest noise. Jumping up to fight the very shadows," said the one on his chest, bopping the crowning glory painfully on the head with his free hand. "No hope for it. You're Gryffindor. Therefore accident-prone."

"And, y'see, we aren't out of place at all," continued the other. "We were delivering a message."

Of course. These were young enough to be employed at Hogwarts. The professors there often traded information with the Mrs., who was the Head Governor and very concerned about the state of young magical minds. They could not send post directly to Wiltshire. Wiltshire had all kinds of strange antique wards on it to keep out the wrong sorts, and in the olden days, when the owls had not been restricted for Ministry use, it might have been easily reached by bird. But now it was effectively cut off from non-Ministry post, and any professor seeking to confer with the Mrs. would have to go through Helvede Hill.

But who had sent these two? Only the more domesticated, better behaved unmarked were given tasks which might bring them into contact with proper witches and wizards. There were codes and regulations about it! Only a very foolhardy sort would disobey them.

The one in the back read the question on his face.

"Your head of house sent us himself," he said, waggling his fingers mockingly. "Wonder what he's got to say to Her?"

"Maybe it's about you," said the first one, snorting. "And I'll bet you thought he liked you too much to snitch. Loyal lion fellow. Dances to Her tune, doesn't he?"

"Not much of a lion at all, I say," said the second.

"Ought to be skinned, I say," said the first. "Cut off his fat flabs and make him into a lion-headed carpet."

"She probably will. Seems in Her line," said the second.

To hear these horrible creatures speak of the Mrs. in this manner was too much to bear. The crowning glory feared her, but he loved her, too, as the only mother he'd ever known, even if it took all his powers of denial to do so. He said, "Why are you still here? Whatever the message was, it's delivered! Get out!"

"Wanted to explore," was the insolent retort. "We're not allowed home for spring hols."

"Not allowed much of a home, period."

"Not allowed much, period."

"Not allowed, period."

"That's it. That's our life."

"You're the crowning glory of society. Aren't you supposed to be giving alms? Helping society's unfortunates?"

"Here we are. Lucky you."

"How long am I supposed to be subjected to this?" snapped the crowning glory, so panicked that he wasn't even thinking anymore, just reacting.

"If you ask us," said the one on his chest, looking back at the one on his legs, clearly enjoying the whole affair. They chorused together, "As long as a suffering world allows you to live!" Then they collapsed into laughter.

Behind the crowning glory's head, there was a soft thump on the stair just beneath the landing. He twisted his arms out of their bind, twisted his head, took advantage of the momentary distraction to get a good look. And saw a tall white shape, also in brown, hair lit up like fire from the light below, freckled and skinny and indistinct, seen only from the corner of his eye.

A third one!

"Oh, no you don't!" cried the unmarked on his chest, struggling to regain control. But it was too late. His hands were loose. They shot inside his robe and grasped at his wand, and even if it wasn't aimed quite properly he was tutored twice a week in dueling, and so he managed to produce a sizeable blast which dislodged both his captors, and sent them hurtling towards the wall. This taken care of, he sprang up and whirled around to meet the third. Who was vanishing down the stair at breakneck speed. The crowning glory followed, in a blind rage. Unmarked were here! Here! On Helvede Hill! It was a revolution. It was the worst of Mr. Gibbon's predictions come to life.

And it was his duty to stop it.

The third unmarked was fast. Tall, too, with a powerful stride that meant he took one step for every three of the crowning glory's. But of course he wasn't properly armed. The Ministry graciously did not deny unmarked their wands; that would have been cruel in the extreme, and in any case magic needed an outlet; a magical person without a wand would have been like a stoppered demon, and would have exploded at some point. But the wands assigned to the unmarked were pathetic, ancient bits of twig, not at all proper wands, not wands that had chosen them. And besides this they were layered with all kinds of inhibitory enchantments, rendering them useless when it came to both offensive and defensive spells.

He cornered the unmarked near the front hall.

It was a boy. Just his age, or thereabouts. Skinny, with hollowed eyes like the others, with close-cropped red hair and crimson lashes, and very very freckled, as though he spent a lot of time out of doors, which, if he was employed at Hogwarts, he very well might have. Well. Maybe he had been employed at Hogwarts. But now he'd overstepped the bounds of his assigned task, intruded on the home of a pureblood of good standing, on the crowning glory's home, no less! Not simply an offense against decent society, but an offense against Her. The Mrs. This unmarked would be lucky to receive Azkaban. It would be hours of Crucio 'til he lost his head, more like. It might even be the Kiss.

And those red-rimmed, hollowed eyes, staring so defiantly at the crowning glory, knew it.

But now something strange happened. The crowning glory had him trapped against a tall black grandfather clock, wand against his throat. Quite at his mercy. Ready to immobilize him at any minute. And he hesitated. He couldn't. He couldn't do it. It was not anything about the third unmarked, particularly, that made whispering a magic command impossible. It was only his awful, awful fear. Now, all too well, he understood what Pansy had been saying earlier.

I could get in trouble if I don't.

Because it was his duty to keep creatures like this one – filthy, degenerate, possibly even the child of a blood-traitor – in line. It wasn't simply, as the Mrs. often described it, an unalloyed pleasure. In fact, it had never been a pleasure at all, to him. Perhaps in some other life, in which he were less of a disappointment, were not cowed and bullied and scared all the time, the crowning glory might have enjoyed doing his duty to the Minister. But in this life he did not. He was pleased, satisfied to have power over the third unmarked, especially given the momentary humiliation he'd suffered at the hands of the others. He was not at all upset to be the one holding the wand, the one in control. But to go further than that? To deliver a living creature, no matter how degenerate, up to the worst fate of all? How could the crowning glory do this?

He couldn't.

"Well?" said the third unmarked tersely, as though daring him.

"Shut up," was the rebuttal, just as terse.

"Reckon Mrs. Lestrange won't like you hesitating," said the unmarked. "This is her house, isn't it?"

"Shut up. It's not. It's mine. And you shouldn't have come here!"

The freckled chin waggled up and down, nodding. "I can see that. It's clear as day, now. Silly me."

"All of you!" the crowning glory said fiercely. "You're all done for. This is my house. I live here. And you don't belong. You've got your place, and now you've stepped out of it and it'll be an uproar when everyone finds out."

"Reckon I'm in your power now," said the unmarked. "You could have me killed, I reckon."

"Or worse," was the menacing reply. But there was no bite in it. They could both tell, at this point, that there was no bite. Why couldn't he just say something, immobilize the boy? He couldn't. He just couldn't. Secretly he wanted the boy to escape. Possibly to obliviate him in the process, not that an unmarked's paltry secondhand wand could do that. But to remove all traces of this encounter from his mind, to remove his responsibility to the Mrs., to simply make it as though the whole day had never happened. Then he would not have to be afraid of the consequences. He would not remember a thing.

"Of course," his prisoner was saying. "Worse. Worse. You could have me Kissed. Or trussed up before the Undersecretaries."

"Just so," said the crowning glory.

"Right. Well. In that case, just one thing…."

"What?"

And then, from behind, something viciously knocked him down, blurring his vision.

When he next blinked, now sprawled out on the floor, the first thing that occurred to him was that the unmarked, every last one of them, were master strategists. On the landing, the first two had been mocking him in order to keep his attention away from the third. And in the hall, the third had engaged in him in conversation to keep him from noticing the other two creeping up behind him with the fireplace poker. Now all three peered down at him, three eerily similar freckled faces. The first two looked gleeful. The third, simply pensive. He reached down and rifled through the crowning glory's pockets.

"Don't!" the crowning glory cried. But too late. Already the unmarked had produced not just the parchment, but also the photograph. He held it out to the other two. Their hapless captive attempted to stand up, only to have one of others brandish his own wand in his face.

"Those're his parents," said the remaining unmarked, the one with the bruise on his collarbone. "His real ones."

"Reckon this is important to you," said the tallest one. "Isn't it? Is it true what they say about them? That they were killed by—"

"By blood traitors!" shouted the crowning glory. "That's what they say."

He was treated to three identical disbelieving looks. They made him want to scream. He lunged at the one with his wand, and was quickly knocked down, Muggle-style, with the force of superior strength and numbers.

"We'll be taking this," said the third unmarked quietly, pocketing the photograph. "You tell anyone we were here, and I'll destroy it. I bet it's the only picture left of them, right? The only one left in the whole world. She'll have destroyed the others. Dunno why, if they were killed by blood traitors."

The crowning glory sucked in a breath. No. No. It was his, that photograph. Those people were his. And the secrets this horrible boy was dredging up: those were his, too.

"Ronniekins," said one of the others. "That's a rubbish move. He'll tell on us, and get it back."

"He won't," was the quiet reply. "He won't risk it. I wouldn't, if it were our parents."

He was right.

They left. With the parchment, which thankfully had no names on it to implicate Parvati and Blaise, and with the photograph, which needed no names. The faces therein looked so much like his – anyone could link it to him immediately. And it was his photograph. It was his, his, his, his, his.

Gone.

He sobbed horribly, childishly into his pillow. All around him, the grey rain of Helvede Hill muffled the noise, so that when the elves returned at first they could not tell he was crying, not until they came close enough to huddle around his bed, twisting their long fingers in concern, and when they did this he batted at them viciously until they left him alone.

He slept. He slept through most of the spring holidays, and sat bleary-eyed and depressed through three more visits from cowering potential mates, girls with green and silver ties and fear in their eyes. He felt hollow. He could have gone and rifled through the trunk again, traced the names on the letters, but he did not. Why did he feel as though something priceless had been taken? He didn't even know those people. He barely felt the link to them. Not at all.

The Mrs. did not stop by Helvede Hill, nor did she write. In fact, she did not communicate in any way, though she had use of the Ministry owls, and it would have been easy for her. The Mr. gave a cursory floo-call. He seemed to feel he owed it to his wife. His black-whiskered head popped into the fireplace just as the crowning glory had succumbed to another crying fit.

"Go away, Rodolphus!" the crowning glory shrieked then, though he had never before, not once in his life, willingly turned away anyone who offered a break from the monotony of Helvede Hill.

"Now, Draco," said Mr. Lestrange, his florid face both baffled and affronted. "Stop the dramatics."

* * *

One of the first things anyone asked me about the Eleventh Birthdays was how Draco Malfoy was doing in Voldemort's new world. Now you know.

Blaise's poem is by William Blake.


End file.
